THURSDAYS WITH CHRIS

It happened on a Thursday, the day I loathed, hated, and one day hoped to strike off the calendar for good. Thursdays are probably not so depressing for other people, but it’s the day we have our weekly Maths test, and guess who comes bottom of the class?

As I said, it was a Thursday, and it so happened that it was the last Maths test of the term. I knew I should be overjoyed just like the others, but I could not help feel terrible; if I did not pass this one, and with a wide margin at that, I would probably be in for trouble.

It so happened that in honour of the occasion, Sir Dutt, who in my opinion should be sent to teach I ITians instead of bothering us with his irritating superior brilliance, set the most difficult paper yet. I was not the only one who thought so, but I was the only one who would have to get in trouble this year. Trouble has a different name in our school – its called summer school, where those unable to qualify for the next year during this term had to sacrifice themselves ( I mean our summer vacation) at the altar of Sir Das, the only teacher who spent his summer vacations in school, every day, teaching all the subjects some students like me were terrible at. After close interaction, I think I can say with certainty that he was the Devil incarnate, or at least his earthly messenger, after all, his name was not ‘Das’ for nothing!

Next Thursday, (why always a Thursday for Maths, what’s the bad omen that always blots this day?) I trudged to school and into class, to see no Mr. Das but a gnome of a man, someone so old but extraordinarily youthful looking that for a second I guess I was trying to place him as a character somewhere in ‘The Chronicles Of Narnia’. I sat down, no one else was there for Math summer school, and waited for the terror, sorry teacher, to come in. The little old man with a youngster’s aura looked up from his work reshuffling books at the back of the class, to smile at me. “So you’re Angela? Good, good, I’m a replacement for Mr. Das, so I suppose I should have begun with my name, I’m Mr. Wren, but call me Chris.” Emotion number one was elation, then followed confusion, doubt, thoughts of scatter-brained professors, and finally, embarrassment. I had no idea how to behave with this unknown teacher, (always a tricky situation), moreover, one who probably went to school with your grandfather yet insisted you call him Chris. “Sorry for the name, you know, my parents were architecture fanatics and worshipped Christopher Wren. He’s the guy who built St. Paul’s Cathedral. It’s so embarrassing, I can’t even draw a house, but I was put in architecture school, and naturally dropped out. But I loved Maths, so here I am, or here and there I should say, as a substitute teacher. I haven’t got any teaching degree so I never can get a permanent job. Still, I suppose you came here to learn, so I mustn’t start a sob story. Dear me, what a way to begin,” he said, all the while flitting around the room arranging bookshelves and models, pirouetting around so furiously, that by the time he settled down in his chair, I thought my spinning head was conjuring another classroom in front of me. Once it dawned on me that it was still quite familiar, I realized the difference – the models did not belong to the class. We had never had such humungous piles of books, and the maps were not really maps of countries. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I thought, like Alice in Wonderland. Maybe this is Neverland and that’s Peter Pan! Puzzled, I turned back to face him, only to realize that he was right beside me in the chair next to mine, with an open book. Putting on a pince-nez, of which quite frankly I had only ever read of in books, he proceeded to say, “We’ll start with Leonardo, I think, that’s best; this book probably has most of his stuff.” Taking a closer look, I said, for the first time, “But Sir, we don’t have that. Our syllabus includes theorems and their problems, and riders, not their derivers. Besides, Leonardo was a painter!” Poor chap, I thought, he really is not all there. “Of course he is. Have you ever noticed his paintings have tremendous mathematical significance? Look at this sketch of a sunflower.” It was beautiful; a full-page black and white charcoal drawing of a single sunflower head. He indicated to my amazed eyes to look at the tiny numbers all over the picture, that I had not realized were even there. “This is a series of numbers that goes like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ….and so on. It’s called the Fibonacci sequence, and all things in nature follow it, including the whorls of the petals in this sunflower. Da Vinci was not a mathematician, but a stickler for perfection, which led him to observe nature and its structure in such extreme detail that he hit upon this sequence. Everything follows it---the patterns of bee hives, the whorls on your fingers that gives you the print, the arrangement of branches in trees, they may look haphazard and unorganized, put there any old how, but there is order in disorder, and that’s the Chaos theory. But I began somewhere else, didn’t I?”

I need not bother describing the extent of my amazement, you can see for yourself, but I must say that the idea so swept me away, that I had not even got the time to be disgusted at the numbers. The idea of nature possessing such intricacy enamoured and enthralled me, and I found myself hungry for more. Questions, answers, arguments and discussions---that was the way he taught me Maths. The meadow outside school, the ferns and ivy on the walls outside, the models of animals and the maps of, not countries, but beautiful dissections of the anatomy of everything---humans, animals, insects, the inner workings of clouds, the making of mountains by the elements of nature, all taught with numbers.

By the end of summer school, we had not even touched upon the syllabus, the textbooks and notebooks lost somewhere in the beautiful chaos of my mind. When term began, I approached him without any of the panic I thought I would feel at having not learnt anything but the Vitruvian Man’s theory, the Fibonacci sequence, Chaos and Malthus’ assumptions and not the equations, graphs and diagrams that I should have, and asked him what I should do now, to be able to learn Maths better. “Why, sit in class, of course. Beyond that what do you think you should do anyway?” I knew I had enjoyed this summer more than any before it, but the fact that I was still no better at my weakest subject dampened my once buoyant spirit.

Next day, Thursday, (it had come to mean so much more) I went to class and was amazed to realize that I understood what Sir Dutt was teaching. And I mean everything. After school, I ran to the house of the amazing Mr. Wren, hoping against hope that whatever hypnotism he had worked upon me would last. He let me in as soon as I knocked, almost as if he was expecting me. “I was expecting you.”(oh well) “So, did you like class?” When I told him the whole story, he smiled indulgently, and said, “That, my dear child, was the whole point. I did not teach you Maths, I taught you to learn to understand and appreciate its beauty. You have no need of extra help anymore.” On hearing that, my face fell. “Can’t I at least visit? I don’t think I can continue to like Maths if you’re not there to guide me and anyway, you teach me a lot more than we ever learn in school. “Please?” I begged. “Of course, you can”, he smiled and said, “but only on a Thursday. After all, we’re Thursday people.” Hmm, echo of ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’, I wonder if I would write the sequel……